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The grammar instruction that survives in modern America amounts to little more than uncritical repetition of 200-year-old classifications that make little sense, plus a few lists of unexplained prohibitions: Don't do that, this is an error, beware of the passive. Worse, those who purport to know English grammar use it primarily to nitpick: The surprising and engrossing business of exploring sentence structure is perverted into a source of cheap points in a game of Gotcha. The victims of this grammar bullying end up in a sorry state: insecure about their linguistic abilities yet clueless about what to do. Writing abilities suffer rather than being enhanced. This lecture surveys the situation, and offers not only some warnings but also some remedies.